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FEATURES
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24.03.2025
Everything You Tell Alexa Will Now Go To Amazon
If you needed to get a bit more paranoid about the world, Amazon will soon have access to each and every word you tell Alexa. Amazon is quietly eliminating local processing of voice commands starting March 28. This means every command issued near an Amazon Echo device will travel directly to Amazon's cloud servers.
Until now, some Echo devices offered an opt-in feature called "Do Not Send Voice Recordings" that stopped audio requests from going to Amazon. That choice is now vanishing.
23.03.2025
Chinese Spacecraft Practicing Dogfighting Maneuvers in Orbit
The US Space Force has accused China of "dogfighting in space," a term that usually refers to fighter jets caught up in an aerial, close-range battle.
During a defense program conference this week, Space Force vice chief of space operations Michael Guetlein said that the military arm had observed "five different objects in space maneuvering in and out and around each other in synchrony and in control," as quoted by Defense One.
The Space Force is "starting to see our near-peers focusing on practicing dogfighting in space with satellite-on-satellite," he said.
If confirmed, the practice could indicate an escalation in the defensive military capabilities of world powers in orbit, highlighting a heating up "space arms race."
22.03.2025
This Massive Israel Lie Destroyed By Israeli Newspaper
Israel not Hamas is derailing the Gaza ceasefire and preventing the hostages return - Owen Jones discusses the state of the UK's broken mainstream media.
21.03.2025
We Need A New Progressive Program, And We Need It Now!
Yes, it's a terrible program: a toxic mix of pro-oligarchy economic policy, tribal-nationalist politics, patriarchal social values, and hatred of the public sector. But MAGA policies are based on a relatively coherent ideology that identifies what right-wingers consider the main sources of oppression - the administrative state, left-leaning universities and news media, undocumented immigrants, street criminals, and foreign competitors - and that promises to eliminate or transform them.
MAGA leaders believe that the American system is broken and that they know how to rebuild it. Therefore, once in power, they implement immediate measures to change existing institutions. True, these initiatives tend to be poorly thought through, arbitrary, and inhumane, and they generate legal challenges to the authority of the President and other executive officials. But social movements with a program for change frequently strain or violate existing norms. Furthermore, their advocates tend to take strong action, while defenders of the established status quo seem content just to talk.
Talk about role reversals! By acting as change-agents, the MAGA-pols have maneuvered the Democrats into the position of acting as backward-looking defenders of the Establishment. The anti-Trumpers mean well, but all their handwringing about the President's authoritarianism, venality, and cruelty will not change the fact that his forces have a program for change, and they do not.
20.03.2025
Israel Hid Weapons/Bombs In Schools & Churches To Massacre Arabs & Brits
Zionist terror groups hid arms in homes, schools, hospitals, and synagogues. As noted by the CIA, these raids established "almost to the point of certainty" that Tel Aviv was the headquarters of Zionist terrorism in Palestine.
19.03.2025
Entire Families Wiped Out As Israel Bombs Gaza’s Residential Areas
Palestinians in Gaza were woken up by Israel unleashing a new wave of attacks on Gaza which killed at least 404 people and wounded 562.
The attacks on Tuesday not only shattered a period of relative calm in Gaza during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan but also the fragile ceasefire deal Israel had with Hamas.
Palestinians who had returned to their damaged and destroyed homes after the ceasefire came into effect were also targeted by Israel's relentless bombing as entire families were wiped out in seconds.
18.03.2025
Cliff Cash: The Long Road (Full Stand-Up Comedy Special)
Cliff Cash titled his first stand-up comedy special "THE LONG ROAD" because it reflects his 13-year comedy journey, filled with twists and turns. He started in Wilmington, NC, at Nutt Street Comedy, attending open mics religiously for two years. Within 18 months, he began touring regionally and won titles like Port City's Top Comic, Comedy Zone's Almost Famous, and Comedy Central's UpNext regionals. He also performed in Standup NBC.
Each achievement felt like it would be his breakthrough, but the years brought both hope and disappointment. Industry insiders urged him to move to NY or LA, but Cliff stayed true to his roots, choosing to forge his own path. For years, he lived out of a modified station wagon, touring extensively, camping, hiking, and exploring between shows - often sleeping in his car. He visited 45 national parks and earned a reputation nationwide as "more than just funny."
His journey has been marked by near misses, lean times, breakdowns, loss of a parent, home, marriage, dog, and the discovery of new love, stepchildren, and spiritual growth. Now, it's all captured in this one-hour special that tackles everything from racism and homophobia to redemption and love.
Cliff reflects, "Comedy is a marathon, not a sprint. It demands tenacity. It's hard, no matter how funny you are. There have been times when my logical mind said, 'walk away,' but that little kid, the adventurer, the class clown, just can't. I love it too much to quit."
"The Long Road" is, in essence, a love story - a road comic who has fallen deeply in love with life's journey: the challenges, the next adventure, the sound of laughter, the pull to say something meaningful, to do something that matters.
17.03.2025
Royal Television Society Reinstates Award For Gaza Journalists After Backlash
The cancellation of the award during the Television Journalism Awards in the UK last week sparked outrage in the UK, particularly among media staff.
Nearly 400 journalists, including leading media personalities, signed a petition requesting a meeting with King Charles over the decision to drop the recognition award and demanded an explanation of the decision-making process.
Signatories of the letter included Channel 4 News presenter Krishnan Guru-Murthy, television and radio presenter Sangita Myska and historian and former BBC current affairs presenter Jonathan Dimbleby, who called the RTS "cowardly" for its decision.
16.03.2025
AI Scientists Are Sceptical That Modern Models Will Lead To AGI
In a survey of AI researchers, most say current AI models are unlikely to lead to artificial general intelligence with human-level capabilities, even as companies invest billions of dollars in this goal.
Tech companies have long claimed that simply expanding their current AI models will lead to artificial general intelligence (AGI), which can match or surpass human capabilities. But as the performance of the most recent models has plateaued, AI researchers doubt that today's technology will lead to superintelligent systems.
In a survey of 475 AI researchers, about 76 per cent of respondents said it was "unlikely" or "very unlikely" that scaling up current approaches will succeed in achieving AGI. The findings are part of a report by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, an international scientific society based in Washington DC.
15.03.2025
Ditch Amazon's Audible & Self-Host Your Audiobooks
We're an audiobook family at House Hutchinson, and at any given moment my wife or I are probably listening to one while puttering around. We've collected a bit over 300 of the things - mostly titles from web sources (including Amazon's Audible) and from older physical "books on tape" (most of which are actually on CDs). I don't mind doing the extra legwork of getting everything into files and then dragging-n-dropping those files into the Books app on my Mac, but my wife prefers to simply use Audible's app to play things directly - it's (sometimes) quick, it's (generally) easy, and it (occasionally) works.
But a while back, the Audible app stopped working for her. Tapping the app's "Library" button would just show a spinning loading icon, forever. All the usual troubleshooting (logging in and out in various ways, removing and reinstalling the app, other familiar rituals) yielded no results; some searching around on Google and DuckDuckGo led me to nothing except a lot of other people having the same problem and a whole lot of silence from Audible and Amazon.
So, having put in the effort to do things the "right" way and having that way fail, I changed tacks and fixed the problem, permanently, with Audiobookshelf.
14.03.2025
Mahmoud Khalil: In His Own Words
Listen to Mahmoud Khalil's story in his own words: how his family ended up in the refugee camp, where he was born and his aspirations for a free Palestine.
This clip is from the upcoming film The Encampments, which features Mahmoud. It is set to be released this year by Watermelon Pictures and executive produced by Macklemore.
13.03.2025
Israel Is Continuing The Genocide - But The UK Media Will Not Tell You
A ceasefire does not mean that Israel has dropped its goal to annihilate Gaza. The mission remains the same, and the war crimes endure, including killings - the method just shifts. Now, the textbook starvation of the enclave is the weapon of choice.
But the British public will not be privy to such details - not if they rely on the mainstream media to report them accurately.
In early March, as the first phase of the ceasefire was ending and the full withdrawal of Israel's forces from Gaza was supposed to take place, Israel decided to block all aid from entering the territory.
The media reported it but, characteristically, thinned out the details.
13.03.2025
Israel Has Been Trying To Ban Free Speech For Years
Mahmoud Khalil’s arrest culminates a years-long campaign of the Israel lobby to criminalize its critics and shut down pro-Palestinian student activism.
13.03.2025
The Palestinian Voice Cannot Be Silenced
The furore has focused like a laser on Abdullah al-Yazuri, the 13-year-old narrator who has committed, in the eyes of Israel's propaganda industry, three capital offences: first and foremost, he is alive. More than 14,500 children are not.
His second offence is to speak English fluently and thus be credible to a western audience. This is a monopoly held by supporters of Israel, and it is keenly guarded.
Abdullah's third offence is to be objective and non-political. He is the one who delivers statements from the Israeli army after each civilian massacre its soldiers commit.
13.03.2025
If Veterans Can Unlearn The Propaganda, There's Hope For Humanity
Rebecca Roberts joined the Air National Guard thinking she would help her community. Instead she got stationed at a drone base in Djibouti. This is Rebecca's story about how her deployment to East Africa made her see the injustices of the US empire from the inside.
12.03.2025
We Are All Travelling At The Speed Of Light
We all travel through space time at the speed of light. But, what does it really mean? How does it explain the consequences of special relativity - time dilation, length contraction, relativity of simultaneity, and more.
11.03.2025
Here's Why America Needs Donald Trump Right Now
President Trump won all seven 2024 swing states, turned a couple of blue (Democrat) states to red, and overwhelmingly won. He became only the second man in the nation's history to win non-consecutive terms in the highest office in the land.
Trump achieved this despite a variety of court cases in multiple jurisdictions, an extraordinarily hostile media and a would-be assassin's bullet on his way back to the White House. Trump's poll numbers in the first weeks after being sworn in on January 20 were the highest they have ever been.
The international media were flummoxed. How did this brash, rude, overbearing man convince more than 77 million Americans to vote for him? The answer is much simpler than it may seem.
10.03.2025
How Netanyahu's Alliance With The Far Right Could Be Israel's Undoing
The tides of history are unforgiving, yet Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sails them with reckless abandon. Across Europe and the US, he has forged a treacherous alliance with those who, not long ago, would have found common cause with history’s worst enemies of the Jewish people.
In his desperation for diplomatic support, Netanyahu has aligned with movements steeped in xenophobia, anti-Muslim hatred, and - beneath their polished pro-Israel rhetoric - the same insidious antisemitism that has haunted Jews in Europe for centuries. It is an embrace that echoes past betrayals; a chilling reminder that political convenience often trumps moral clarity.
09.03.2025
Elon's Grok Chatbot Calculates Probability That Trump Is A Russian Asset
Elon Musk's supposedly "anti-woke" chatbot, Grok, keeps spewing outputs that are hilariously opposed to the billionaire's views - including that newly-minted President Donald Trump is likely a Russian asset.
Responding to a prompt from Arizona Republic columnist EJ Montini, Musk's "maximally truth-seeking" AI, which is built into X, said after an analysis that the probability of the president being in the pocket of Vladimir Putin is between 75 and 85 percent.
After Montini asked Grok to rate on a scale from 1 to 100 that Trump is a "Putin compromised asset" based on public information and his "failure to ever say anything negative" about the Russian president, the chatbot went to work analyzing a "complex web of financial ties, personal interactions, political behavior, and circumstantial evidence."
08.03.2025
Why Your Life Is Probably A Simulation
As new technology throws up increasingly advanced computer simulations, humanity is beginning to ask; is our reality really what we think it is?
It’s certainly a question academics are also grappling with.
To get some answers, presenter Max Tobin peers into the digital rabbit hole alongside Nick Bostrom, a philosopher with an intriguing simulation hypothesis.
07.03.2025
Canada's Trudeau Humiliates 'Cowardly' Trump Who Backs Down On Tariffs
MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell explains how Donald Trump, the "most economically ignorant president in history," backed down on his "illegal tariffs" against Canada and Mexico after Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau rebuked his tariff lies in speaking directly to the American people more convincingly than the "blustering, lying" Trump.
06.03.2025
Documentary: No Other Land
An Oscar-winning documentary offering a powerful view of destruction in the West Bank and the unlikely friendship between a Palestinian filmmaker and an Israeli journalist.
Note: This is available on a number of streaming platforms including Channel 4, YouTube, Prime Video, Apple TV and others. The link above is to The Pirate Bay.
05.03.2025
How Aaron Bushnell Inspired People In The Military To Question U.S. Empire
We remember Aaron Bushnell, the U.S. Air Force member who died last year in an act of protest outside the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C. On a live-streamed video, Bushnell said he could not be "complicit in genocide" while the United States continued to support Israel's war on Gaza; he then set himself on fire, screaming "Free Palestine" until he collapsed. Now just a year after Bushnell's fatal self-immolation, we speak with an active-duty Air Force lieutenant who says she is inspired by Bushnell to seek a discharge from the military as a conscientious objector over the genocide in Gaza. "Any kind of contribution to the U.S. military inherently helps this machine of warfare and imperialism and oppression continue," says Joy Metzler, who says many people in uniform suffer "moral injury" from their service. We also speak with Levi Pierpont, a friend of Bushnell who says Bushnell's death was "life-changing" for him. Pierpont has since visited Palestine and become a peace activist. "I went from being someone who had grown up Christian Zionist and was very sympathetic to Zionism to realizing how it's interconnected with the American empire and realizing how we need to stand against it as Americans, because we're implicated in it," says Pierpont.
04.03.2025
Media Death Cult: Are We Living In A Science Fiction World?
This is a video about the future, about speculative fiction and how the two collide. Predictions, warnings, hopes and dreams, fears and wonderful prospects. Are
we living in a science fiction world, and if so which one?
03.03.2025
Musk's Insomnia - Brain Fog, Mood Swings And Paranoia
As flagged by politics and sports analyst Nate Silver, a graph compiled by The Economist that tracked Musk's tweets from 2014 until November 2024 illustrated in stark detail how frequently the billionaire posts - and, since it's not (yet) possible to tweet while sleeping, how incredibly little sleep he gets.
With tiny red dots, the graph not only charted the Tesla and SpaceX owner's prolific posting output by date, but also by time of day. As his tweeting has become more and more frequent in recent years, so too has his short window of "off" hours when he's presumably slumbering.
Unsurprisingly, those gaps in tweet times also grew shorter and more erratic after he purchased Twitter in the fall of 2022, as the graph makes clear. That was also, as The Economist noted, when he began to delve seriously into politics, posting regularly - and at time incoherently - about free speech, immigration, and what he calls the "woke mind virus."
02.03.2025
Trump Browbeating Zelensky Offers Rare Window Into How US Wields Power
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was unceremoniously kicked out of the White House on Friday after a meeting between him and US President Donald Trump descended into total bedlam in front of the world. America's friends, foes and just curious spectators got an unprecedented view of Trump and Vice President JD Vance fighting, gloves off, with the president of a European country at war with Russia. The footage of the three men arguing in the Oval Office is without parallel in the history of the United States and will likely be remembered for a long time.Foreign governments task their spy agencies with obtaining such behind-the-scenes snippets into the tensions and arguments of rivals and allies alike. No other nuclear-armed state has ever allowed the world to have such a raw window into its talks with a country it is arming at wartime against another nuclear-armed state.
01.03.2025
J.D. Vance Is Trying To Avoid Being 'Relegated To The B-Team' Under Trump
Vice President J.D. Vance's attempt to make himself the center of attention at the extraordinary blow-up in the Oval Office with Donald Trump and Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky is part of an effort to get himself out of the shadows as the Trump administration takes shape.
That is the opinion of the New York Times' Michael Shear who wrote that Vance has been making increasing efforts to insert himself into the conversation as he has been overshadowed by billionaire Trump advisor Elon Musk.
During the televised appearance with the president and the leader of war-torn Ukraine, Vance took the lead as an attack dog on Zelensky by calling him "disrespectful" which opened the door for Trump to berate his presidential counterpart.
28.02.2025
Gaza: How To Survive A Warzone
Watch the recently banned BBC documentary Gaza: How To Survive A Warzone on Rumble now.
28.02.2025
Hundreds Of People At Washington Post Are Trying To Flee Jeff Bezos
According to Pulitzer Prize winner David Remnick, the Washington Post is facing the possibility of an exodus of hundreds of employees who have no faith in owner Jeff Bezos after his latest controversial move.
Moments after legendary Washington Post editor Marty Baron appeared on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" to criticize the billionaire Amazon owner's ruling that the venerable paper's editorial page will only parrot his "particular point of view," Remnick, who got his big break at the Post, joined the pile-on.
While speaking with the MSNBC hosts, Remnick claimed more employees will follow editorial page editor David Shipley out the door as soon as they land jobs with the Post's competitors.
27.02.2025
Cory Doctorow On Elon Musk's "Chaotic Blitz" At DOGE
We speak with the acclaimed science fiction author, activist and journalist Cory Doctorow, who has spent decades writing and thinking about the impact of technology on our lives. He coined the term "enshittification" to describe how online platforms degrade the user experience over time in search of profits, though it has been widely adopted to describe a larger sense of decline and decay across society. He discusses his new book Picks And Shovels, Silicon Valley's big bet on artificial intelligence to discipline its workers, and billionaire Elon Musk's work in the Trump administration. "The point of this chaotic blitz is to demoralize their opponents," Doctorow says of Musk's work through DOGE, which has gutted government agencies and wide swaths of the federal workforce. "In the reality-based world, even if you are worried about government waste, even if you want to make government smaller, you have to acknowledge the empirical fact that payroll accounts for 4% of the federal budget."
26.02.2025
Microsoft CEO Expresses Doubt About AI Value
Last week, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella made an eyebrow-raising appearance on a podcast dismissing the hype around claims of having achieved "some [artificial general intelligence] milestone" as "nonsensical benchmark hacking."
Most strikingly, Nadella admitted that AI simply hasn't generated much value so far, arguing that economic growth due to the tech would be a much more compelling demonstration of AI's actual accomplishments.
It was an unusually muted response given the tens of billions of dollars the tech giant has poured, and is planning to pour, into the development of AI and the infrastructure to support it - despite real-world applications for the tech remaining few and far between.
25.02.2025
Palestinian Says Israeli Interrogators Poured Acid On Him During Torture
A former Palestinian prisoner has said that Israeli soldiers poured acid and other chemicals on his body during an interrogation while he was in their custody.
Mohammed Abu Tawila, who was kidnapped from Gaza during the Israeli invasion launched in October 2023, was subjected to severe beatings, which included targeting his eye.
He told local media soldiers kidnapped him from an area near the Civil Affairs office in Gaza City to a home belonging to the al-Yazji family.
There he was tortured with chemical substances, including acid, chlorine, dishwashing liquid, laundry detergent, soap and air fresheners.
24.02.2025
Stop Repeating The Vast Undercount Of Gazan Deaths - It Is Ten Times Greater
Enough already of the media's lazy indifference to the vast undercount of the Palestinian death toll from Netanyahu's genocidal daily bombing and shelling of Gaza's defenseless civilian population. I'm referring to all the media - the corporate media, the public media, and the independent media. They all stick with the Hamas Ministry of Health's (MOH) count of named victims whose corpses have been identified by hospitals and mortuaries. For months there have been no operating hospitals and mortuaries to send their grisly data to the Health Ministry.
The official Hamas count that all sides like to cite is now over 48,000 deaths. As American doctors back from Gaza before the Rafah closing last year said - just about everybody surviving in Gaza is sick, injured, or dying. They put the death estimate almost a year ago at a minimum of 95,000, not counting tens of thousands of families buried under the rubble when Israeli F-16s blew up entire apartment buildings.
23.02.2025
Elon Musk's AI Said He And Trump Deserve The Death Penalty
Elon Musk's OpenAI rival, xAI, says it's investigating why its Grok AI chatbot suggested that both President Donald Trump and Musk deserve the death penalty. xAI has already patched the issue and Grok will no longer give suggestions for who it thinks should receive capital punishment.
22.02.2025
Incomprehensible Brutality: Israel's Mass Torture Of Palestinian Prisoners
Basil Farraj, Assistant Professor at Birzeit University in Palestine, joins the show to discuss how Israel is set to release 602 Palestinian prisoners on Saturday, bringing the total freed to 1,737 as part of the ceasefire deal. Farraj discusses the brutal conditions of Israeli detention, where systematic torture, starvation, and abuse have left many prisoners in critical condition, while Israeli captives released appear unscathed by comparison.
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